Overview

Overview

Provides insight into a key issue of Christian history which still has a huge influence on ecclesiastical practice and politics.

In most of its forms, Christianity has been a religion focused on the salvation of individuals. This has meant that its churches have questioned what sort of people, and which specific persons, are saved; and so have tried to describe the qualities of such 'saints'. The debates involved have ranged through the outward signs of salvation, whether saints can be identified in this life or after their deaths, whether their often extraordinary lives should serve as examples for a wider Christian public, and whether saints have a power that they can exercise on their own initiative or are owed a particular devotion. This collection of essays provides a stimulating sample of recent historical research on Christianity's approach to these questions. It spans the earliest construction of personal sanctity in the Eastern and Western traditions, the 'golden age' of saintly cults in the medieval period, post-Reformation debates about the role of saints, and the meaning of canonization within a variety of churches in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It therefore provides insight into a key issue of Christian history which (as the later essays show) still has a huge influence on ecclesiastical practice and politics.

PETER CLARKE is Reader in Medieval History at Southampton University. TONY CLAYDON is Professor of Early Modern History at Bangor University.

Table of Contents

IntroductionHoliness and Sanctity in the Early Church - Andrew LouthThe Monk as Christian Saint and Exemplar in St John Chrysostom's Writings - Pak-Wah LaiCommemoration, Representation, and Interpretation: Augustine of Hippo's Depictions of the Martyrs - Elena MartinHagiography and Autobiography in the Late Antique West - Peter TurnerPopes, Patriarchs and Archbishops and the Origins of the Cult of the Martyrs in Northern Italy - Alan ThackerRepentance as the Context of Sainthood in the Ascetical Theology of Mark the Monk - Alexis TorranceThe Signifiance of St Cuthbert's Vestments - Maureen C. MillerWhy did the Crusader States produce so few Saints? - Bernard HamiltonSanctity as a Form of Capital - Katharine SykesSaint and Monster, Saint as Monster: Exemplary Encounters with the Other - Samantha RichesPenance, Mercy, and Saintly Authority in the Miracles of St Thomas Becket - Gesine Oppitz-TrotmanSeeing the Light? Blindness and Sanctity in Later Medieval England - Joy HawkinsThe Vision of St Fursa in Thirteenth-Century Didactic Literature - Chris WilsonErat Abigail mulier prudentissima: Gilbert of Tournai and Attitudes to Female Sanctity in the Thirteenth Century - Christine WalshLiturgical Changes to the Cult of Saints under Henry VIII - Aude de Mezerac-Zanetti'I, too, am a Christian': Early Martyrs and their Lives in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Irish Manuscript Tradition - Salvador RyanSt Pius V (1504-72) and Sta Caterina De' Ricci (1523-90): Two Ways of being a Saint in Counter-Reformation Italy - Patrick PrestonVisualizing Stigmata: Stigmatic Saints and Crises of Representation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy - Margit Thfner, Reviews EditorSan Luigi Gonzaga: Princeling-Jesuit and Model for Catholic Youth - Oliver LoganThe Northern Saints after the Reformation in the Writings of Christopher Watrson (d. 1580) - Margaret M Harvey'Truth never needed the protection of forgery': Sainthood and Miracles in Robert Hegge's 'History of St Cuthbert's Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme' (1625) - Sarah ScuttsSimulated Sanctity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Malta - Frans CiapparaSt Winifred, Bishop Fleetwood, and Jacobitism - Colin Haydon'Master in the Art of Holy Living': The Sanctity of William Stevens - Robert Andrews'A saint if ever there was one': Henry Robert Reynolds (1825-96) - Clyde BinfieldCommerce and Culture: Benjamin Gregory's Sidelights on Wesleyan Sanctity in the later Nineteenth Century - Martin WellingsThe Canonization of Serafim of Sarov: Piety, Prophecy and Politics in Late Imperial Russia - Richard M PriceSanctity and Mission in the Life of Charles de Foucauld - Ariana PateyCéline Martin's Images of Thérèse of Lisieux and the Creation of a Modern Saint - Sophia DeboickAnglicanism and Sanctity: The Diocese of Perth and the making of a 'Local Saint' in 1984 - Rowan Strong'A Saint for all Australians'? - Josephine LaffinPope John Paul II and his Canonizations - Michael Walsh

Reviews

A stimulating collection of papers (and) an important addition to academic libraries. ÓENACH

Includes numerous stimulating contributions, some of which will surely become part of ongoing debates about the role in church history of sanctity, hagiography, and clerical authority. JOURNAL OF THEOLOGICAL STUDIES